In this article, I shared the insights of student participants in order to address several questions regarding the use of hypermedia design in K-12 schools. The results of this study add to the professional knowledge base in several significant ways. The students identified several meaningful purposes for constructing a school website, aside from the obvious one of educating and informing people about the school. These can be categorized as (1) giving students a global voice; (2) showing the world that they are up to date; (3) communicating a sense of school pride; and (4) attracting students to the school. Giving students, rather than teachers, ownership of the school website can have numerous benefits for the junior high school culture.

I also sought to discover what kinds of general pedagogical benefits and challenges were involved in creating a school website. Benefits included student empowerment, motivation, and collaboration; challenges included time constraints, equipment limitations, lack of technical skills, and disharmony among students. Educators would be well advised to take these challenges into consideration when making decisions regarding the use of hypermedia technology in the classroom.

Finally, I investigated the potential benefits of a student-designed school website for the language arts curriculum. I found that, in the natural course of constructing such a website, students utilized print-based literacies, engaged in oral literacy, applied problem-solving and critical thinking skills, and employed the multimedia-based language processes I termed interpreting and composing.

Although there are significant challenges to the successful integration of multimedia technology in K-12 schools, collaborative hypermedia design and publication on the Internet can provide students with an authentic audience for their work and constitute a new form of semiotic expression. Based on the results from this study, I conclude that the four generally recognized language arts processes need to be expanded to include multimedia-based literacies. The ramification of adding multimedia to the traditional language arts model is that educators must begin to incorporate multimedia-based content into their language arts curricula.

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